The king of Saudi Arabia warned his country would strike with an "iron hand" against people who preyed on youth vulnerable to religious extremism, a day after suicide bombers struck three cities in an apparently coordinated campaign of attacks.
In a speech marking Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that celebrates the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, King Salman said a major challenge facing Saudi Arabia was preserving hope for youth who faced the risk of radicalization.
"We will strike with an iron hand those who target the minds and thoughts... of our dear youth," Salman, 80, said.
Saudis were rattled by the rare, high-profile attack.
Militant attacks on Medina are unprecedented. The city is home to the second most sacred site in Islam, a mosque built in the 7th century by the Prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam, which also houses his tomb.
Attacks on Mecca, the holiest place in Islam, have been extremely rare. The Al Saud ruling family considers itself the protectors of both sites. Islamic State says the Saudi rulers are apostates and has declared its intention to topple them.
claman wrote:Careinke : Or maybe the collapse of orthodox islamism.
claman wrote:It sounds good, but it is hard to believe that the old ties between Whahhabism and the Sauds should be broken. Especialy now when Shia and Iran is rather aggessive. I would like a further explanation of why the saudies would deny their old relations with the wahhabs.
My brother was weak, so I bought him a bow and arrow. I taught him to shoot, and we practiced and practiced until eventually he became even better than me. Then he shot me.
The House of Saud has never been popular in the Muslim world. Yes, it has enjoyed esteem as a result of its significant wealth; yes, the Wahabi strain of Islam has grown significantly across the planet as a result of its patronage, but the notorious excesses of the Sheikhs have passed into myth and folklore. Amongst mainstream Sunnis, the hardline ideology it promotes and the debauchery its members indulge in were overlooked because it deployed so much of its oil wealth in supporting Muslim communities and restoring a sense of prestige lost in the process of colonisation.
As far as the wider Muslim world is concerned, the Saudis derive their legitimacy from their role as “Guardians of the Shrines,” maintaining the most sacred sites of Islam in Medina and Mecca and enabling the two million people who go on Hajj each year to complete the journey safely.
This year many of them were not able to do so. Instead they died in a crush apparently caused after crowds were diverted to enable a Saudi royal to complete the ritual of “stoning the devil” from the back of his limousine. Not only that, but the Saudis initially blamed the crowds themselves, saying that they had not followed instructions and have been very disingenuous about the number killed, with some reports suggesting that it reaches well into the thousands. Right down to the fact that the dead were buried in mass graves, the whole Hajj incident was proof, if any were needed, that the House of Saud are failing in their custodianship of the Shrines.
The only things they have left to secure their continued control over those sacred sites, and the legitimacy they bestow upon their rule and the ultra austere, anachronistic and ideologically genocidal creed of Wahabism their ability to protect the “purity of the faith” and of course, those famous bottomless coffers.
With the price of crude low and dropping, the Kingdom has already been forced to begin cutting subsidies to its population.
The Gulf States are gearing up for a war with their own people, a second Arab Spring. Saudi, the UAE, Bahrain and Qatar are putting in place all the instruments needed for sustained repression of the majority by a small ruling class. They are doing so because the low oil price is making it very clear what a Gulf future without the exceptionalising power of oil would look like.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Anyone care to explain how bombing in Saudi Arabia caused the price of oil contracts to fall $2/bbl yesterday?
... All three attacks were coordinated in the style of Al-Qaeda and its offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but unlike their usual operations, these would be viewed as failures from their perspectives. In all instances, the suicide belts were exploded outside the apparently targeted buildings, and the death count from all three is lower than we have witnessed in the past.
No one died in Jeddah apart from Khan. Two were killed by the explosion outside a mosque in Qatif, and four security guards died in the parking lot close to the Prophet’s Mosque. Are we therefore to believe that the merchants of terror who have killed tens of thousands in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, Paris and Belgium have lost the plot? I do not think so.
Media fingers may be pointing towards ISIS as the likely perpetrator of these heinous crimes, and indeed it considers the kingdom an enemy. However, for the group to explode the Prophet’s Mosque would be a contradiction in terms. It would be obliged to consider a name change.
I smell a false-flag operation here. There is another foe of Saudi Arabia, and like ISIS, it has ambitions to dominate the region and become the guardian of the holy sites in Makkah and Madinah. This is a wealthy rogue state whose leadership is working to advance the Day of Judgment, as evidenced by videos it disseminates to that effect.
Evaluate the motives and capabilities of all the groups and states out to harm the kingdom, and follow the money. No devout Muslim would have consented to bomb Islam’s second-holiest site, so there is likely to be a paperless hawala cash trail.
KaiserJeep wrote:Maybe it's just my ignorance of petroleum technology. I know that Standard Oil drilled some of the earliest oil wells in the US and that many of these depleted conventional wells are again productive due to the fracking technology. Obviously they will then produce for a while and then decline again.
Can not the oil wells in KSA, already declining in a conventional sense, also be fracked, and will not the ME still be productive after the wells in the USA again peak and decline?
After all, the glut won't last forever, and the peak means that half the total oil has been produced, it does not mean that the end of oil is near.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Tanada wrote:KaiserJeep wrote:Maybe it's just my ignorance of petroleum technology. I know that Standard Oil drilled some of the earliest oil wells in the US and that many of these depleted conventional wells are again productive due to the fracking technology. Obviously they will then produce for a while and then decline again.
Can not the oil wells in KSA, already declining in a conventional sense, also be fracked, and will not the ME still be productive after the wells in the USA again peak and decline?
After all, the glut won't last forever, and the peak means that half the total oil has been produced, it does not mean that the end of oil is near.
For whatever it is worth here is my understanding. Oil bearing rock formations consist of pore spaces that hold tiny droplets of oil. Where the pore spaces are large and naturally interconnected the oil flows easily from pore to pore until it reaches a well bore and is extracted. Where pore spaces are smaller and less well connected it takes more time and effort to get the oil droplets to flow to the well bore for extraction. In 'tight shale' formations the pore spaces are very small and the inter connections between pores is low or even completely absent.
Oil reservoirs in Saudi Arabia are mostly large well connected pores so the oil flows out with very little effort. This makes oil extraction in Saudi Arabia incredibly cheap compared to conventional wells in other places.
Oil reservoirs in North Dakota shale fields are the opposite, very small pores with very low connectivity that require fracking to get high production rates. The cracks caused by fracking connect the trillions of tiny pores together in a path that leads to the well bore and allow the oil and gas to flow easily.
In the depleted conventional reservoirs where Fracking has revived things in the USA fracking has made cracks that connect the pore spaces together more directly to the well bore making it easier to extract the oil that was still trapped in pores with poor connectivity to the natural pathways. In Saudi Arabia Fracking could do the same thing for those fields with average pore size and connectivity, but their best fields have excellent connectivity already. Fracking wouldn't do much to help in a field that already has excellent connections between pores and might even damage the rock in a way that reduces the flow of oil through the natural paths instead of improving it.
I am sure the oil experts around here will pipe up if I messed up that explanation of why reservoirs in KSA are not likely to flow better from Fracking technology in the future.
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